A P-member that declares the process failed, a neutral standard expert and surprise BRM delegate insults his national committee and other delegations, unresolved date bugs, discussions about what really happened, and Greek delegate Antonis Christofides with an insightful contribution to transparency.

Antonis Christofidesposted a report with clarifications. In my opinion it is one of the best reports from the BRM. After a five days negotiation round you would not expect thoughtful writings.

I have been one of the two Greek delegates to the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM). Lots of things have already been written about the meeting. I will not repeat them here, but will only make a few clarifications on things that I think are not well understood.

When I discussed my proposal with Brian Jones [Microsoft/ECMA] on Thursday morning, he pointed out that it would be difficult for Ecma to accept it[??], because they did not have the time to verify that it actually works in all cases. Now this was a very valid concern. My proposal was more than 30 pages. Even if it were well thought and error free, Ecma had no way of knowing that. Therefore, the BRM was essentially confined to making changes that only scratched the surface of the problems.

Apparently the date problem could not be optimally resolved and ECMA was able to exploit its advantage of privileged access/proposal. A Greek national body alternative resolutions for a problem could not be adopted by the BRM for the reason Antonis explains us. It is a remarkable irritation that a private party as ECMA International got an official and powerful role in the ISO BRM (but no press, no observers, no live broadcasting, participants silenced) and attempted to pull the strings. I am confident future ISO reforms will take the power from ECMA back to the NB - the legitimated stakeholder that are supposed to take the decisions at the BRM.

Does OOXML tell you how to translate a binary document into OOXML? No. Does it tell you how to map the features of legacy documents in OOXML? No. Does it give an implementor any guidance whatsoever on how to "represent faithfully" legacy documents? No. So it is both odd and unsatisfactory that primary goal of the OOXML standard is so tenuously supported by its text. …Microsoft should simply publish this mapping. Without such a mapping, conversions will be inconsistent, interoperability will suffer and a primary goal of the standard will not be met.

Another classic follower of the debate: Groklaw conducts an interview with Andy Updegrove who runs the Consortium Info Blog. Although he was no participant of the BRM he is quoted by many. Mr. Updegrove was one of the first who gave some BRM result insights that were disputed by the convenor and others.

Contributor "overshot" shots at Brian Jones who was part of the ECMA team at the BRM.

Seconding Brian Jones, the BRM made great progress. Once the editorial stuff was out of the way the BRM worked through 20 of approximately 900 issues this week. It seems as though the only thing standing in the way of a quality specification is a bit more time to work out the remaining issues. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that another 45 weeks should do it for the fast-track process.

Ballmer also cited the company's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format, now under consideration to become an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization, as another example of how the company has opened up.

Rick Jelliffe, the "independent" expert sent by Standards Australia removed his blog post. His controversial teaching why the BRM was only able to cast an eye on a small part of the specification: the other BRM delegates were slow and incompetent.

It is typical that most delegates at these kind of thing are not up to speed on everything (because you want deep experts at these things, more than generalists), what is atypical is the large number of non-technical delegates and that a few delegates seemed surprised that their delegations would have to figure out a position on each issue by the end of the week (which could be “abstain - we have no position”.) It is not as if they hadn’t been told!

and he continues to explain why getting governments(!?) involved is beneficial to the standard. His subtile suggestion is to approve the standard or Microsoft could walk away and leave no role to governments for a maintenance role.

There are a lot of those, and they will have to go to maintenance, which really is the big issue: will MS continue these baby steps to openness or will they go soggy once out of the spotlight, which is not unprecedented by other standards stakeholder? Even after the final vote (assuming an acceptance vote, as seems likely) governments will need to keep the pressure on Ecma to continue working with SC34 and to get these outstanding issues addressed ASAP; it is not the case that unaddressed issues need to disappear down a black hole, but SC34’s only power comes from having strong government and user backing to give this maintenance the steroids it needs: this not only means monstering MS to continue through maintenance, but also to provide adequate resources: staffing, delegates, and long-term support for participation at standards meetings. The government needs to be asking “What support are we giving to developing and encouraging our technical experts?” otherwise they are talking through their hats about standards. There is no such thing as an instant expert.

Let me suggest that Rick Jelliffe found his call for state aid inappropriate and removed his blog post for this reason. Or was it because he attacked members of his national committee (he was supposed to represent as a national delegate) and his fellow international colleagues:

That is not to say that the final text will be acceptable to our National Body, Standards Australia: there are people for whom no amount of improvement in the text will make OOXML an acceptable subject for an ISO standard, there have been so many changes the result needs a good looking over. And there are people who are concerned the MS OSP is unsound (IP was not an issue for the BRM to discuss.) And again it is not to say that even when an issue was addressed, we got our preferred position or that the changes will be completely acceptable in every case: other pesky nations got in the way.

"Malaysia decided to vote 'Disapprove' to these undiscussed issues," Fadilah elaborated, "The limitation of the BRM process clearly showed that such a task of approving this draft standard does not fit in the Fast Track process employed by Ecma International. Malaysia and other country delegations worked very hard which extended into evenings after the BRM sessions. All the technical experts from diverse backgrounds, including from Microsoft, the original proposer of the Draft, put their heads together to fix the specification. Malaysia approved the counter proposals by many National Bodies which were discussed during the BRM. Unfortunately there were just far too many to fix within the given time."

Time contraints were a concern for Malaysia:

"Malaysia had submitted 23 comments and more than 70% of them were not addressed satisfactorily by Ecma's proposed dispositions. We intended to resolve these technical issues at the BRM, but we could only raise 2 concerns due to the time constraints imposed," Fadilah said.

Two things are immediately clear from much of the post-BRM commentary; a) the proposed DIS29500 standard is nowhere near ready to become an international document standard and b) the ISO and BRM processes, while integral to open standards, have to deal with some serious governance issues.

Microsoft is going to have to eventually come to terms with the fact that they will need to put a lot more effort into their OOXML specification before it becomes a useful and implementable standard (remember they haven't even implemented it themselves in their own Office products) and the fact that so many man hours are being wasted on this standard is obviously starting to grind with many.

Lastly, Rick Jelliffe also needs to rethink his position with regards to the continued failure of OOXML and the fact that in its current form it will never be fixable unless it is overhauled by Microsoft internally. Unfortunately, Jelliffe sees himself as the be-all and end-all of XML, believing that anyone that doesn't share his views is clueless about the proposed specification and therefore any issue they have is invalid and should be ignored. Add to this his arrogant and often derogatory commentary and it is easy derive his view of OOXML is clearly skewed in favour of Microsoft no matter how broken the underlying specification.

In a surprise statement on his personal web-site, Patrick Durusau now says he recommends approval of OOXML/DIS 29500 in ISO:

So, now that Microsoft is listening (something we should encourage), in an international and public forum, what are our options? Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written. Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard. Granting that I wince at parts of DIS 29500, it is hard for me to argue with that rationale. Because approval of DIS 29500 insures an effective international and public forum whose members will be heard by Microsoft I recommend approval of DIS 29500 as an ISO standard.

The Brazilian delegation to the BRM had asked for a mapping from the legacy Microsoft formats to their OOXML counterparts to be included in the standard specification, as providing this backwards compatibility is one of the main selling points of the standard.

The delegate was urged not to pursue this proposal by an ECMA member, who cited time constraints. When pressed, the ECMA representative admitted that the organization (which, after all, is responsible for the submission of OOXML) has no clue how to map the MS-legacy formats to the newly proposed ones and thus a major part of the standard is only known to Microsoft and not available for any potential independent implementors.

Rick Jelliffe after having removed his first report on the BRM (http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/03/the_hell_of_geneva.html, the one linked to above) has written up a summary of the standardization proceedings, which - in his view - have been rather positive, fruitful and unspectacular. He sees a bright future of "co-evolution" for MS-OOXML and ODF: "The upshot is that, if DIS29500 mark II and ODF 1.2 both get accepted as standards, by the end of 2008 we should have two standards which together can thoroughly cover the field of representing current and legacy office documents, each representing one of the two dominant commercial traditions, with both under active and significantly open maintenance to fill in the remaining gaps and to repair pending broken parts, with clear cross-mapping to allow interconversion, with an increasing level of modularity so that the can share their component parts, and at least with a feasible agenda of co-evolution and other kinds of convergence."

The report contains a long list of all the "big picture" to "small picture" changes that have been approved at Geneva.